You are completely missing the nuance of managing a professional sports team and avoiding league penalties announced specifically to minimize blatant tanking. There are 2 parts to all this, one part is the FO deciding who to keep, the 2nd part is the coaching staff trying to be competitive. For this to work and avoid penalties the FO needs to give the coach the worst possible team without blatantly dropping everyone so the league gets suspicious. The coach, for his part, needs to try to be as competitive as possible, again to avoid the league coming down on them for blatant DNP-CDs geared toward tanking. It is the same thing as the president having no knowledge of the aliens in area 51. Plausible deniability. The coaching staff has plausible deniability as they are still playing to win. But if I replace several of your good chess pieces, like knights and bishops, with pawns, and tell you to go win, that chance of winning goes down. But a good player with pieces that surprise you and still play together well can get some surprising wins, despite being hamstrung by a FO that replaced some of your key pieces. See none of this can be blatant or we get penalized, and that is the last thing we want. The worst thing that could happen would be to drop like a rock in the standings then have the league take all that losing effort away from us and give it to someone else because they determine we are tanking against league rules. It is a balancing act to be sure, but do not let that fool you into thinking the goal here is to try to win a championship or something. The goal is to maximize our assets, and get in the best draft position we can without being penalized for it. So at the trade deadline we were performing way way better than the FO thought we should, with a surprise all-star on the roster, so we move our last "star" player. You better believe there were likely teams with better offers for Conley, he is highly regarded after all, but we traded him for a handful of decidedly non-magic beans. The FO is doing the best they can to replace all our good pieces with pawns, but we have a few pawns that refuse to stay pawns, and a coach that is a pretty damn good chess player, and that is the part that we simply cannot control for, and if we do then we get penalized for blatant tanking. So we manufacture a few minor injuries that take weeks to heal, when it really maybe takes days, and we keep some key people out that way. Fudge a few numbers. Take a few "precautions" to bring back Sexton and Clarkson healthy after their boo-boos heal, which, you know, will take much longer than we thought *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*. And the tank gets put back on track, at least as much as we can. We do not have the luxury of an organic tank job like OKC or Houston, which is happening over several seasons so their losing is more organic. We are forcing the issue which makes the tank much harder without waking the giant and getting penalized for it. But tanking it is, nonetheless.
